Univercells Tecchnologies and NIBRT Announce Collaboration

Univercells Technologies’ intermediate capacity scale-X carbo system, which includes a fixed-bed bioreactor and in-line concentration, will be shown and trained in the Dublin plant to facilitate continuing education and workforce sustainability.

FREMONT, CA: Univercells Technologies, a global provider of next-generation biomanufacturing technologies, and the National Institute of Bioprocessing Research and Training (NIBRT) in Dublin, Ireland, have announced cooperation to address the need for training in Cell and Gene Therapies (CGTs) utilizing next technologies for viral products manufacture. Univercells Technologies’ intermediate capacity scale-X carbo system, which includes a fixed-bed bioreactor and in-line concentration, will be shown and trained in the Dublin plant to facilitate continuing education and workforce sustainability.

“Across the industry, developers and manufacturers are looking for next generation technologies. They require purposefully designed tools that apply the principles of intensification, integration and semi- or fully continuous processing to overcome the existing barriers to discovery and commercialization in viral manufacturing,” said Mathias Garny, CEO, Univercells Technologies. “Our scale-X product series is a uniquely intensified and automated solution that can help to bring advanced therapies to the market using reliable, reproducible processes with increased capacity in a decreased footprint. We are honored to have it featured at a respected institute like NIBRT and contribute to training the workforce that will drive manufacture of the advance therapies of tomorrow.” 

As the clinical pipeline of CGTs continues to increase, demand for viral vectors has risen to unprecedented heights. Existing technologies have severe constraints in terms of supporting manufacturers from the research to commercial phases. To meet the high capacity and cost restrictions, specific manufacturing methods will be needed to optimize, scale up quickly, and deliver these products. Because of the increasing rise of CGTs and the intricacies of the production process, there is a critical scarcity of highly experienced CGT manufacturing personnel. The enhanced bioreactor will be crucial in assisting in the upskilling of beginner to expert level biopharmaceutical workers and researchers and exploiting such scalable technologies to overcome the clinical gap.

John Milne, NIBRT Training Director, commented, “We are always looking out for the latest bioprocessing innovations to accomplish our mission of supporting the biopharmaceutical industry with access to the most advanced technologies for research and training. The scale-X carbo system is the ideal intermediate-scale system to train on process development, optimization, and scale-up principles through R&D to commercial capacity. The scale-X carbo system will help our team to deliver cutting edge training and research collaborations in viral vector development.”